Scented Thoughts Archives

Lily of the valley by BranchDesignThe smell of muguet (Convallaria majalis), or lily of the valley in English which has also retained the French word especially in the field of perfumery, is instantly delightful, delicate and fresh, with a capital...

Springtime is generous with floral and fresh notes. Like a natural calendar that unfolds over the weeks, you can discover a variety of delicate to heady notes when you put your mind to it wherever you are, at the florist's,...

Scented Thoughts -- On Perfume Vintages: No Leap Year for GivenchySince 2005, Givenchy has turned to the concepts of natural harvests and vintage years to create renewed interest for some of the mainstay compositions from their fragrance catalog (see 2006;...

As announced previously last month, here is my follow-up article on the idea of turning to "Perfumes That Smell Unique Because You Are Unique" on how to pick fragrances that have an unique signature to them and seem to defeat...

 Do you notice the similarities between a perfume by Salvador Dali called Sea and Sun in Cadaques launched in 2006 and Ma Dame by Jean Paul Gaultier introduced last year in 2008?...

When I initially posted about the 25th Tova Anniversary, I soon had to realize that Tova Signature perfume was somewhat of a pop culture phenomenon thanks to the popularity the scent had gained over the years of being sold on...

Here are the new print ads for the fragrance Miss Dior Chérie shot with model Maryna Linchuk. Sofia Coppola has been hired by Dior to film the TV commercial version of the ad featuring the same model but the latter...

1931 advert for Un Air Embaumé by Rigaud from Memory PubSmelling some recent releases in the past few days, one of them being Lyric by Amouage, it has struck me how, precisely, perfumes might have lost their lyrical, limpid and...

Lavandin AbrialisReviewing By Kilian Prelude To Love yesterday, I puzzled over the question of why this young and exclusive niche perfume house had decided to compose a bold citrus-y fragrance, quite literally plugging into a group of notes that from...

An early engraving of the musk deer, here called the "musk-cat" - Hortus Sanitatis, 1490 PERFUME STREETWEAR: THE WHITE-MUSK TREND IN PARIS... VRAIMENT? by Chantal-Hélène WagnerBeing in Paris, a capital-city bigger, more kaleidoscopic than Cambridge or even Boston, with more...

The 39 Steps by Hitchcock via The Erotic ImpulseIn typical fashion for our general approach and perception of a perfume, images come first and then the first inhale. How much this precedence of the visual over the olfactory guides our...

Hope everyone is having a lovely 4th-of-July weekend! There are still fireworks planned for this evening so the festivities are not quite over yet in the part of the country where we are. The other day the countryside smelled fresh...